Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Just wanted to give you guys a little heads up about this piece of art. I am currently selling it on eBay, and I will be donating whatever it goes for to the ALSA. You can find the auction here if you would like to bid on this piece of art:

I was nominated by a fellow comic book artist, Khary Randolph to take on the ALS Ice Bucket Challnge, but with one important twist... Instead of pouring a bucket of ice water over my head, I had to draw some characters doing the challenge. Of course I picked a couple of Ninja Turtles for the task and added a little chibi twist to it. I thought this would be a great way to help the cause by helping raise awareness through these great characters, and also by donating the funds I get on the piece straight to the ALSA.

I hope the art finds a good home with a real turtles fan.

Please feel free to share this post with anyone you know who might like to buy the art work so I can raise as much as possible for this cause. I have seen what this terrible desease can do to people (not personally, but through some very touching videos online) and I think it is great that they are getting their moment to shine in the spotlight. Hopefully through all of the shennanigans we have made a difference to some of these peoples lives!

All up I did 15 covers for them, and they are all original and one of a kind!

Hope you guys enjoy checking them out.

Here are a few more recent turtle pieces I did to wet your appetite!

Happy Hunting!

J.

UPDATE: All covers sold out within minutes of going up for sale. I will be selling off 10 covers as commissions in the near future, so if you are interested, keep an eye out for an announcement. thanks!

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Wow... 5 months since the last update! Sorry about that my poor little blog. Today I will fix this up!

I'm back to my commission list, which means I am making my way through the list one by one until they are all done and the slate has been wiped clean. 2013 has been a year of tying up loose ends for me and it feels good!

This piece is one of my standard 9 x 12 copic marker commissions. Here you can see my pencils as well as a couple of other thumbnails for some poses I was trying out. This was the 2nd page of sketches I did until I finally landed upon the pose that I liked best for the piece.

Here you can see a close up photo of the actual art which gives a much nicer look at the actual colours on the piece. Unfortunately my scanner is a real POS.... they dont make them like the used to!

Monday, April 8, 2013

Hello? Testing, testing.... It's dusty around here...time to clean off the cobwebs and make some regular updates. Anyone reading this?

Well, I'm still making my way through all of these Ozmosis commissions, so if you are still waiting, here is proof that yours is coming soon! There are not too many left...maybe 15 or so and then I might open up for new commissions. Maybe.

Anyway, this one was cool... I was asked to draw Wolverine, which is always fun. I added the big Sentinel head in the background to create a little more of a story for the piece and to give me something which I could use to help Logan pop off the page even more.

traditional pencil with digital pencil

For you guys who like to see some of the steps and progress behind the scenes...well, you know thats what this blog is for... so here you go. I apologise for the watermarks, but people have been stealing my shit and trying to sell it, so I gotta do what I gotta do. Those scallywags!

So, this is kind of where my process is at these days. I like to start with my pencil and sketchbook as I have always done. Once I have something that I'm feeling pretty good about I will usually scan it and then clean it up and mess around with it a little digitally. In this case you can see below that I actually drew the sentinel head completely digitally because it was an idea I had when I was sitting in front of my computer I suppose, so that's just how it worked out.

Find my on Instagram. User name: sommariva

Above you can see a progress shot I took once I had done most of the line work on Wolverine. In the scan below you can see that line work with the undersketch removed, but this was the same step here.

inks done with a brush pen

Thanks for reading, and hopefully I will see you guys back here very soon!

Friday, April 5, 2013

Well, I just finished a smaller commission last night that I wanted to share here.

I loved this book when I was a kid. There was so much imagination on these pages. It's the kind of book you see as a kid and remember it your whole life. You know, I probably havnt actually seen the book for maybe 30 years, but those monsters have always remained vivid in my head.

So, when I was aksed to draw one of the monsters from 'Where the Wild Things Are' by my friend, Charles Santoso, I was very excited. Well, I really had a blast working on this piece and spending a little time remembering the story and characters.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Well....It has been a while since the last update. I have been quite busy finishing off Rexodus and working on a bunch of stuff, but now Rex is in the can and waiting to be published which is good! I can't wait for you guys to see it.

For the past two weekends I had the pleasure of being a guest of Oz Comic Con in Perth and then Adelaide. Wow! What an amazing time. I met a lot of people and it is so great to see so many people interested in what we (comic book artists) do for a living. Very exciting. Over the 10 days I was there chilling and working with my buddy David Yardin we produced a lot of art from head sketches to full size pieces. It was good times indeed!

So, I'm hoping to get a chance to show some of the actual scans here for you guys to check out. If you already follow me on INSTAGRAM you may have seen a bunch of art, but at the end of the day there is nothing quite like seeing a nice clean scan....and further to that, there is nothing quite like seeing the original art in person! At least, that's what I think.

Here is one of the pieces that came about thanks to this tour. I was asked to draw LOBO vs Atrocitus. Now, I LOVE drawing Lobo... This was actually the 2nd time I have done a commission of him, but I had never heard of Atrocitus before. All I really know about him is that he is a Red Lantern and he spews blood. He's a big dude, so I am picturing him going for a WWF body slam here, but Lobo is obviously very ready with his blades.

Had fun working on this one... More to come soon!

Cheers,
Jon.

PS: My latest art book, Ozmosis Chills III is officially SOLD OUT now, but never fear, there will be another coming soon as well as a collected volume of numbers 1 and 2...More on that later.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

October has been a crazy month so far! I have been super busy working on the last issue of a comic book series called REXODUS. The comic is coming along great and I can't wait to start telling you all about this. I should be done penciling by the end of the year. The last issue is 48 pages!

So, in between Rexodus pages this month, I did work on 2 little cover jobs. One was for a book which I may show at another time and the other was this CD cover for a band from my hometown of Canberra, Australia. The band is called Los Chavos, and this is the subject of todays blog post.

Before I get in to all of this, I just wanted to say a big HELLO and a warm welcome to everyone who found their way to my blog thanks to the awesome review of my art book on Parka Blogs page. Hopefully you all like what you see. If you like art books, go check out Parkas site!

Thumbnail Sketches

So, for this cover I was asked to draw the band as a group of super heroes for their new album. Andy, who is the lead singer, is an old work buddy of mine and we always talked about me doing a cover for his band one day. Sometimes these things actually happen! They are just about to launch this new album, and so they asked me if I could draw the cover for them. By the way, you can check out their music over here: LOS CHAVOS with a preview of the whole album. You can play it in the background while you look at the art and see if it fits well! So, here you can see my thumbnails and initial ideas for the cover. As you can see I pretty much stuck to the thumbnail version in the final product.

PENCILS: Above you can see the pencil version as I started to clean everything up. I really wanted to make sure that the characters in the background would make sense. Especially the big trombone robot guy. So here is what he would look like if he wasn't covered by the rest of the band. He's a big guy! The main challenge I had was to take 9 individual musicians with 9 different ideas of how they wanted to be represented and then to make them all look like they fit in a team. I decided that a good approach would be to go with a Latin flavour which also represents the music that the band makes. There is also my actual drawing style which helps tie everyone in to the same world. The idea of a traveling Latin warrior band could make a pretty cool comic story I think!

Above is the 'clean pencils' version. At this stage I am already thinking about the colours and how I really wanted to keep the style very open and simple so that everything would read clearly in a very small space. I also wanted to make sure that each character would read clearly. At this stage I am ready for inks!

Instagram inks!

INKS: Here is a photo I took while I was working on the inks. You can get a look at some of the pens I was using. from left to right, there is a micron, a copic liner and a brush pen. So the idea here was to keep all the lines nice and clean. I didn't go too crazy with any ink effects or anything. Just nice clean lines which I knew would look slick with clean cell shade style colours.

Once the inks are finished and I scan the piece in you get something that looks a little something like this:

Black & White line art ready for colour!

COLOUR: The last step is to colour the piece. Going in to this I really wanted to keep the colour style very simple and easily readable as I know that the final product which will be printed on a cd cover which is quite small, so it is good to keep the colours smooth. Here is a mock up version which I tried out with a white background and with a temp title logo. This was also to give me an idea of how the cover would look cropped to CD cover size.

I then tried out a few different colours for the background. There were many possibilities, so in the end I left it up to the band to choose which colour they liked best. I'm still not sure exactly which version they are using, but it looks like green may have been the winner!

So there you have it. The making of a CD cover from start to finish! From here I deliver this to the designer and they will add all the logos and track listing on the back, and bar codes and fine print etc... I'm looking forward to seeing the finished printed version, and I hope to hear the band play live soon!

Hope you enjoyed seeing this process behind making the CD cover. Thanks for reading... more art coming soon!

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Every now and then I get to draw a chibi version of a character. I like having fun with these. The Glyph is an original character by a fellow who goes by the name Estonius on deviant art. You can find many different artists versions of this guy in his gallery.

I've been mega busy lately as I am working on the last issue of a comic book called Rexodus. It's a really cool story with very cool characters and I can't wait to start showing off pages and designs here. So I appologise for the trickly of updates, but that's whats keeping me busy. For anyone wondering, as soon as I am done with Rexodus, I will finish that last issue of Gemini. It will happen!

On the flip side, me being busy means there will be a lot more art coming soon!
In the meantime, you can always grab a copy of my new art book which is available now! Books are doing well, so if you want one, don't miss out! I'll be posting up a preview of the book for you guys here soon.

The image you see above is an older commission I did of this character. This one was drawn on a small piece of A5 paper, so I was really glad to have the chance to revisit this guy without any size restictions!

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Continuing with some A5 head sketches. For this one I was asked to draw my take on Ariel, the Little Mermaid, and to stay away from any cute/kid version. I really enjoyed this request, because I grew up on Disney films. Something I have always wanted to do was to be able to draw girls as pretty as Disney does (or did when they were kings of 2D animation). When I was much younger and first learning to draw, I thought Disney girls were so hot! I couldn't believe that some hairy old dude could make something look so beautiful with just a pencil and paper. Ariel was my first cartoon crush! So it has been interesting to try and capture some of that beauty. I think my 14 year old self would have liked this drawing.

Anyway, I didn't go for the full on Disney version, because then it wouldn't look like I actually drew it, and to be honest I would probably do a pretty shitty job of it. I don't even know if I could. I havnt tried. What I did end up with was a slightly more mature Ariel with a little sexyness thrown in. And I did have a lot of fun with that hair!

As for the art, this is ink and copic marker on A5 size pastel paper. It's small, but the colour and texture of the paper is nice to work with.

For anyone interested, there are still a couple of orignial sketch commission spots open on my new ONLINE STORE as well as art books. I am planning on getting some previews together (photos) of the inside of the book to help any sceptics decide whether this book is worth getting or not. I think it is!

Hope you like! I'll try and post the rest of these A5 sketches all week as I have quite a back-log built up, so check in if you are interested!

Monday, August 27, 2012

Just a quick update. I wanted to share this Michaelangelo head sketch.

The art is done on coloured pastel paper at A5 size using copic markers, brush pen and fine liners.

You know me... I always love a Ninja Turtle request. Can't wait to draw some more!

Also, a quick heads up... I will be posting the link to my new online store where you will be able to grab a copy of my new art book in a few hours time. There will also be a couple of extra bits and pieces for anyone interested in original art.